DMO life is a relay race. You’re passing the baton between community needs, board questions, and yes, marketing. And with a limited budget and most likely a small team, it’s no wonder it can feel like just one more thing on an already endless list. That’s why it’s so common to lean on the age-old advice: don’t put all your eggs in one basket. You sprinkle budget and bandwidth across a bunch of tactics—a little spend here, a few hours there—so it feels like you’ve covered your bases. When time is tight, that feels safer than putting more resources behind one focused effort.
And while that can be sound advice in certain situations, tourism is different. Budgets are lean, funding (more times than not) has gaps, and your board expects you to prove results. In this world, spreading resources too thin is exactly how you end up with a handful of baskets that never quite fill up. What you actually need isn’t more baskets—it’s a bigger harvest. And this is my formal submission that the way you get that is through strategic content.
Since my first job out of college, my life has revolved around words. I taught classes on storytelling, graded everything from first drafts to polished pitches, wrote high-profile campaigns on large marketing teams, and planned strategies that moved people from interest to action. But the real shift in my career came when I became obsessed with how those words actually reach people—how they move from an ad to a page to a plan. You can have the most exciting piece of content in the world. If nobody sees it, or if it dead-ends, it can’t do its job. That’s why scattered spending is a trap.
If you’ve got a $20 million marketing budget, by all means go ahead and test ten things at once. But most of us don’t. We have to make every single dollar pull its weight, and to most people, spreading a little bit everywhere looks like risk management. But when you’re on a tight budget, it’s just dilution. The more baskets you add, the lighter each one gets and the harder it is to fill any of them with results.
There are optics, too. A line item for everything feels safer in a board packet than a focused plan that asks for patience. But optics aren’t outcomes. What matters is movement.
When the pressure is on to “do something,” most destinations take the same approach. Spread the budget out, touch as many channels as possible, and hope that at least one of them lands. On paper it feels responsible. In practice, it rarely works.
Here’s how it usually plays out:
The reasoning makes sense. The execution is where things break down. When dollars are spread thin, nothing compounds. Each channel gets just enough fuel to sputter, not enough to take off. You spend money, but you don’t create movement.
People plan trips the same way they shop. They want answers fast and the next step to be obvious. If you make them hunt, they stop wanting it.
Think about clicking a link for a shirt you love and landing on the retailer’s homepage instead of the product. You don’t dig around. You bounce, and you remember the annoyance. Travel planning works the same way. An ad or article makes a promise; the very next click needs to deliver that promise, quickly, and ideally on a phone. Every extra click is a leak in the bucket.
When spend is scattered, those handoffs get messy. Here’s how that disconnect feels from a visitor’s seat across a few common touchpoints:
You’re scrolling on Insta and you see a reel that nails the vibe you’re looking for. There’s cozy coffee, trail views, clinking glasses, and brunch plates to drool over. You definitely want to go there, so you tap “Learn more” and land on a generic Things to Do page. There’s no business listings, no itinerary, or “build this weekend.” No way to save anything. You scroll, you skim, a notification or email pulls you away. The click gets counted, and the trip doesn’t.
You’re flipping through a regional magazine. A full-page spread catches your eye with a sunset on the lake, a patio full of laughter. You look for “Where is this?” and an easy way to plan it. There’s a long URL you won’t type, or a QR that opens a slow PDF that pinches on mobile. After half a minute of trying, you’re back to the celebrity gossip story you were reading. The feeling fades because the path is hard.
You’re driving along the highway and see a bold catchphrase with a pretty photo. You think, “That looks fun.” The website is forgettable and tiny at highway speed. Later never comes. If you do remember and find the site, you land on a homepage that doesn’t mention the thing you saw, so you poke around, don’t find “that fall weekend,” and move on. Curiosity dies at the first click.
You’re planning a quick weekend away, so you Google “48 hours in [Town].” You land on a generic attractions index with no itinerary or clear next steps on places to go. There’s not much information so you try the website of a competitor who doesn’t really know the town, but they show up with a tidy plan and a place to stay. It’s generic, sure, but it’s there. You take their plan instead, even though it misses all the good stuff, and the chance to tell the town’s real story slips to someone else.
Each of these moments makes sense on its own. Together they explain why the spend feels busy but never builds momentum. The promise is there. The path isn’t.
The instinct to spread your marketing dollars across many tactics doesn’t come from a bad place. It comes from wanting to protect your destination. If you put a little into everything, at least you won’t miss an opportunity. At least you’ll be able to say you covered your bases.
Smart marketing isn’t about doing more. It isn’t about showing up everywhere just to prove that you’re busy. Smart marketing is about doing what converts.
It’s not that billboards, print, paid social, or video are useless. They work when they lead somewhere. They need a home base that catches the interest you paid for and turns it into action. That home base is your content. Your website. The page that delivers on the promise and makes the next step obvious.
Think of content as the place where all roads meet. The job is simple: answer the question, remove friction, make it easy to act, and be memorable enough that people come back the next time.
Here’s what that looks like from a visitor’s seat.
You’re hungry in a new town. You search “best taco restaurants near me.” The result you tap is a clear, helpful blog from the DMO: “7 Taco Spots Locals Love.” It loads quickly on your phone. The intro tells you what you’ll get and who it’s for. There’s a simple jump list at the top so you can skip to downtown or the riverfront.
Each spot has the details you actually need. One short paragraph on vibe and what to order. Today’s hours. A price cue. A one-tap map link. A photo that looks like a real plate of food, not stock. You choose “El Toro,” tap “Get directions,” and you’re on your way.
You have a great meal. On the walk back you notice a short box on the page: “Save this list” and “Get a weekend food map.” You drop your email, because that was painless and useful. Two days later, you get a note with a “Taco + Market Saturday” mini itinerary and links to nearby coffee and a park with a playground. You save it for your next visit.
The next time you’re planning, you don’t start with a blank search. You go straight back to the source that helped you last time. Trust is formed because the content actually delivered. You didn’t just convert once. You became a repeat visitor.
Behind the scenes, all the other tactics did their part because they pointed to this page. The Instagram reel with the sizzling skillet is linked directly to the taco guide. The billboard QR for “Eat Here This Weekend” resolved to the same guide with a clear “Build your food day” button. The paid search ad used the same language as the headline, so the scent trail stayed intact. Internal links on the guide nudged you to “48 Hours of Eats in [Town]” and to partner pages with trackable links. Nothing dead-ended and every path had a next step.
That’s the power of content as the welcome center. It answers the question, hands you the map, and points you to your first stop. It trims the steps between “that looks fun” and a reservation. It’s where you collect the email, the save, the referral, and earn the return visit.
Here’s why a content-first plan actually delivers.
It compounds.
One well-made post keeps working. It shows up in search, anchors social, fuels email, and gives paid a high-performing place to land. Paid ads are different. They work while the budget is on and stop when it’s off. Use paid as an accelerant—point it to your best content and retarget engaged visitors—so the post keeps earning after the flight ends and your cost per action drops over time.
It’s findable on purpose.
Great content isn’t just well-written; it’s aligned to what people are already looking for. That’s where the real magic lives—in strategy. Sometimes demand isn’t what you expect. We saw this with Brookfield Zoo: month after month, people searched for elephants even though they hadn’t been there in ages. The move wasn’t to ignore it and hope it went away. It was to meet it honestly and helpfully: “No elephants right now—here’s what to see instead,” with a clean handoff to what does exist. You don’t know what people are hunting for until you follow the data.
It converts because intent is baked in.
When someone lands on “7 Taco Spots Locals Love,” they’re already in the planning phase. Data-informed topics put you in front of people who already want what you have. That’s why conversion rates are higher. A clear CTA (“Get directions,” “Email me this plan”) turns intent into action.
It works even on small budgets.
We work with Oak Park—a smaller town right next to Chicago with the second-smallest budget in the area. Yet their content produced the second-highest results, just behind the city. We didn’t guess what to write; we followed the data, used the queries people actually type, and built posts that answered them cleanly. When you stop guessing, every paragraph pulls its weight.
It protects the story.
If a competitor answers the planning question before you do, they set the itinerary, even if it misses the good stuff. Blog content lets you shape the plan: where to stay, where to eat, what not to miss, how to make it work for families or accessibility needs.
Proof, not vanity.
With content, you’re not stuck reporting impressions and likes. You can show a clean story of movement—attention turning into action, and action leading to outcomes partners feel. It’s cause-and-effect, not counts, so your board sees results they can trust and decisions they can fund.
A system that keeps working.
Good posts don’t disappear when the ad flight ends or a funding gap hits. They keep showing up in search, keep earning internal clicks, keep growing your retargeting audience, and can be lightly refreshed to stay current. When spend pauses, the guides still move people; when spend returns, everything performs better because there’s a strong page to land on. That’s a system compounding over time, not a one-off campaign.
Scattered activity doesn’t feed your town. A focused content welcome center does. Build pages that answer real questions, make the next step obvious, and point every tactic there. Do that, and the harvest gets bigger month after month.
Kick Push helps destinations tell their story strategically and turn content into conversions—reach out.
